Enterprise Risk and Opportunity Management

Preface

In one form or another, I have been preparing to write this book for many years. In the most recent of those years, my focus has been on collaborating with NASA personnel on producing detailed guidance about potential ways that the agency could apply enterprise risk and opportunity management to help ensure its success as its mission becomes more complex. This collaboration has resulted in the publication of the NASA special publication report, Organizational Risk and Opportunity Management: Concepts and Processes for NASA Consideration.

In the process of writing that report, my thinking has evolved into considering two extensions of the original NASA purpose. First is how EROM can be applied to other pioneering technical organizations, both nonprofit and commercial, some of whom I have previously worked with on matters of risk and opportunity assessment and management. Second is how EROM can be integrated with the identification, implementation, and evaluation of internal controls, complying with new requirements from the federal government. This book, therefore, builds on the NASA work by extending it to be generally applicable to organizations of all sorts that are concerned with performing pioneering technical research, integrating and operationalizing that research into complex technical systems, and satisfying externally mandated requirements.

One might ask, “Why yet another guidebook on EROM when there have been several others produced during the past 10 or 15 years?” ...